The Irish Manuscripts Commission is delighted to be taking part in the Festival of History 2024 with a public lecture entitled Surprising Survivals: The Fire of 1922.
IMC was established in 1928 after the catastrophic fire at the Four Courts in 1922 which destroyed 700 years of Ireland’s documentary heritage. The 100th anniversary of this event was marked with a special edition of Analecta Hibernica — ‘The Fire of 1922’. It includes the first published listing of records retrieved from the rubble, alongside other surprising survivals from archives in Ireland, Britain, and the United States.
Join us in 45 Merrion Square at 11am on Saturday 5th October, as historians and conservators who contributed to this special issue discuss some of their most intriguing discoveries including letters that reveal the last days of the Public Record Office of Ireland before the fire, and the devastation and recovery afterwards.
No booking required — first come, first served.
Notes from the Chief Secretary’s Office:
Presented By DR timothy murtagh
The letters of Edward Cooke, 1795-1802
Among the records destroyed in the Irish Public Record Office fire of 1922, the collection from the Chief Secretary’s Office stands out as one of the most significant losses. For centuries, the Irish Chief Secretary and his under-secretaries carried out the directives of successive Lord Lieutenants, overseeing the central government in Dublin Castle. A crucial aspect of their role involved gathering intelligence on threats to British rule in Ireland. For more than a decade, one official in particular operated as a veritable one-man spy agency: Edward Cooke. From French invasions to domestic rebellion, Cooke’s network of spies and informers kept the government well-informed about Ireland’s revolutionary underground. While many of his letters were lost in the 1922 fire, this paper examines surviving correspondence held in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, revealing the secret history of Ireland during the tumultuous 1790s.
Dr Timothy Murtagh, is a research fellow with the Virtual Record Treasury, based in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. In the current phase of the Virtual Treasury, Tim is the primary researcher on the research strand concerning the reconstruction of the records of the Irish Chief Secretary’s Office c.1760-1830. He is also the author of Irish Artisans and Radical Politics, 1776-1820 (Liverpool University Press, 2023), a study of working-class radicalism in the late Georgian period.
Documents will also be presented by Dr Ciarán Wallace and Jessica Baldwin.
